Friends Couple Enrichment

In Friends’ Couple Enrichment, partners in committed relationships deepen their intimacy, spirituality, connection, communication, love and humor. Couples of all backgrounds explore vulnerability and connection within a supportive community, grounded in Spirit. The advanced communication skills we practice are built on Friends’ testimonies and practices. Wednesday to Saturday, each day begins with worship and closes…

Workshop Description

In Friends’ Couple Enrichment, partners in committed relationships deepen their intimacy, spirituality, connection, communication, love and humor. Couples of all backgrounds explore vulnerability and connection within a supportive community, grounded in Spirit. The advanced communication skills we practice are built on Friends’ testimonies and practices.

Wednesday to Saturday, each day begins with worship and closes with worship sharing

Wednesday July 8, 2026

Welcome & Introductions: Preferred names and pronouns, letting go to be present, and workshop hopes.

Guidelines for Interaction

• All present share responsibility for group care
• Confidentiality is expected
• Speak as if the people you are talking about are present in the room
• Share experiences, rather than exchange opinions
• Each person speaks for self (I statements)
• Speak specifically, not in generalities
• Avoid euphemisms or coded language
• Share from a place of goodwill
• Bring a nonjudgmental attitude
• Focus on your own relationship
• Avoid fixing, setting straight or advising
• Hold each couple with regard and care
• When our words have different impact than intended, we will address the harm and take responsibility

Dialogue: Essential characteristics

• Spiritual practice that fosters understanding and connection with one another and the Divine
• Makes use of communication and other interpersonal skills (e.g., active listening)
• Agreement to engage and on the guidelines for the engagement (e.g., timeframe and time sharing)
• Acceptance of mutual response – ability, and the power of listening to open inner wisdom
• Attention
• Present – you have to BE here to hear
• Roles: Speaker, Listener, Witness

Types

• Checking in – finding out what is going on with you as a couple
• Exploring – clarifying and issue
• Working – resolving an issue
• Reporting – sharing an event with each other
• Witnessing – attending to your partner’s experience
• Affirming – recognizing mutual love and respect

Aids to Dialogue

• Eliminate distractions
• Sit facing each other
• Speak from experience (I statements)
• Invite Spirit and goodwill
• Hold hands or touch
• Use a talking stick to stay in role
• Practice
• Drop the fix-it impulse

Witnessed Dialogues

Purpose: Provides practice in deep listening without critique or comment, underscores universality of experience in committed relationships, promotes new perspectives and productive ways of interacting

Guidelines for witnesses: Provide a lens through which to view your own relationship. Maintain confidentiality, no fixing, advising, or setting straight.

Aids to Witnessing and Being Witnessed:

• Keep the couple relationship at the forefront
• Honor the tenderness of being real in front of an audience
• Be clear as a couple about taboo topics (both must agree to a topic)
• Drop the fix-it impulse: again, way often opens when feelings and needs are simply acknowledged and held

Doing an Affirmation  Dialogue: Two things I like about our relationship and why they matter to me.

Worship Sharing Query: What new information or insight arose today that I can use to promote goodwill in our relationship?

Thursday July 9, 2026

Opening Worship                                

Q&A: What questions do I have about the dialogue process?

Active listening – why and how

Barriers

• Distraction – again, you have to BE here to hear
• Exhaustion
• Anger
• Being in the mood – “We always have time to fight.”

Promoters

• Humility
• Curiosity
• Empathy

Speaker can focus on …
Listener can focus on …
Both can focus on …

Reflection on Our Relationship– 10-minute Check-in Dialogues: What is going on with us individually and as a couple?

Homework assignment – “What are the growing edges of our relationships that I would like to explore?” for Thursday dialogue

Worship Sharing Query – What am I grateful for having witnessed in others’ dialogues?

Friday July 10, 2026

Opening Worship                                

Q&A: What questions do I have about the dialogue process?

Reflection on Our Relationship Part 3 – Growing Edges Dialogue (15 minute): preceded by couples privately sharing their homework

Worship Sharing Query: What have I observed that I can use to be a more effective communicator?

Saturday July 11, 2026

Opening Worship                                

Q&A: What questions do I have about the dialogue process?

Coping constructively with conflict /difference

• Conflict is a function of difference and thus inevitable and normal
• Sacred pause
• Strategies for maintaining goodwill in the bank
• Pay attention to the rise of strong negative emotion in yourself
• Recognize when you are too hot to interact
• Postpone only to a definite time when you can fully attend to one another
• Focus on one issue at a time
• Stick to the structure of dialogue

Worship Sharing Query: What new insights do I have about my relationship and ways of communicating from witnessing others dialogue?

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Resources to take home:

Growth Plan Handout

Respond individually and then discuss with your partner:

• Three things I want for me in the next 3 months.
• Three things I want for you in the next 3 months.
• Three things I want for us in the next 3 months.

Dialogue Suggestion Couples can focus on aspects of their growth plan such as:

• Things we now agree on that we want to achieve as separate persons and as a couple during the next 3 months.
• Things we are going to do either more of or less of as a means of being successful in achieving our jointly agreed goals.

Leader Experience

We led the 2024 FCE workshop at Gathering. In addition to that, we have co-led multiple FCE virtual workshops. Because of the model is of couple leaders, we technically have the same experience when it comes to FCE.

Outside of FCE, Jess is a seasoned educator who has taught at the middle school, high school and college levels. She thrives “flipping the script” in a way that makes in class work participatory and problem solving far more than a traditional lecture.

Gene is a journalist who specializes in collaborative journalism. The skills needed to get different newsrooms to work together has parallels to what it takes for couples to communicate more effectively. He also teaches journalists how to use deep listening skills to make reporting more community-centered and less extractive.